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Hold the sex -- we're family shows
Ottawa Citizen - November 22, 1999
BY JONATHAN STORM
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
What is this strange, new world on television?
It's a world choked with children, but devoid of wisecracks. The self-aware sex talk, what little there is, comes
from grown-ups.
It's a world almost without violence. Even the people who die find a way to keep on living.
It's a world where ordinary life -- as ordinary as it can get in the big, old, gorgeous, clapboard quarters that all
the denizens call home -- is just as important as bagging the perp, resuscitating the patient, or uncovering the
truth about that pesky alien conspiracy.
TV is taking families seriously.
We look for our reflection -- concentrated and idealized, of course -- on television. As baby boomers mature and
seek rewards and identity outside the workplace, TV dramas are packed with family life.
And the success of so many family shows may signal the beginning of the end of TV's torrid passion for people
younger than 25.
The Sopranos on HBO, awash in blood and profanity, but at heart the tale of one man's family, was last winter's
wildfire sensation.
Its moral opposite, sweet 7th Heaven, about a minister, his wife and their brood of seven, outdraws all of the teen
dreams on the hormone-charged WB network.
"It's not your family," said creator Brenda Hampton. "It's not my family. But it's a family that
people don't mind spending an hour with."
And a foursome of family freshmen this fall has broken every tenet of programming. TV folks pop the champagne and
dish out designer pizza if two new dramas hang on until May, but these four shows have moved into the comfort of the
top half of the Nielsen ratings. Last year at this time, the number of new dramas of any kind in that desirable
neighbourhood was one, Martial Law, and it barely sneaked in.
Unlike 7th Heaven and Sopranos, the new shows feature fractured families, a commonplace variety that television
virtually has ignored -- except in comedy -- for its first 50 years.
Three of the four -- Judging Amy (ranked 12th in households by Nielsen), Family Law (18), and Now and Again (55) --
represent CBS's entire new drama slate. The fourth, Once and Again (25), is on ABC.
Providence (19th in the Nielsens so far this year) started the family follies in January when, thrown into the NBC
dead zone of Fridays at 8 p.m., it became the year's biggest new hit -- to the surprise of almost everyone.
The story of a beautiful female doctor who moves back home with her veterinarian father; cute-boy brother; sweet
younger sister, who's also an unmarried mother; and her dead mother who appears to her in dreams every week, it
twitches the heartstrings with pleasant family tales.
Will Dad get over the death of his wife? Will the darling niece, all of 11 months old, ever learn to walk?
But, with a gentle, barely believable -- OK, preposterous -- ER spin, it also follows our heroine, played by Melina
Kanakaredes, at work: magically saving lives with penicillin and pixie dust down at the low-income clinic.
All but one of the new shows, the unabashedly relationship-fixated Once and Again (ABC, Tuesdays at 10 p.m.),
position workplace plots alongside homeplace plots. The device provides two entry points for viewers and gives
writers the opportunity to maintain interest on at least two fronts each week.
In Judging Amy (CBS, Tuesdays at 10 p.m.), the mix is 50-50. Our gal, Amy Brenneman, has left her big-time New York
law practice and her husband for quiet Hartford, Connecticut, where she plays Solomon as the judge in family court.
Should they pull the plug on the comatose child? Should they take the black baby from her loving adoptive white
parents? Amy must decide, while, as she says, "making lunch and doing car pool and looking for lost shoes every
morning."
Executive producer Barbara Hall thinks the time is ripe for her show. "People were obsessed with their work,
and their work was their identity. Now, there's a little more appreciation of other kinds of relationships.
"If your life is geared toward the perception of success, and you get there and discover that you don't like,
or can't actually feel, that success, you have to re-examine and re-evaluate.
"I think the whole Internet and technology thing also plays a part. You can sort of stay at home and be a
success now. You don't have to go through the middleman."
Judging Amy, along with Once and Again, offers a strong "bimodal" component. That's TV talk, meaning it
has major characters from two generations and should therefore appeal to two generations in the audience. Amy has to
deal with her mother, played by the estimable Tyne Daly. Once and Again closely follows the vicissitudes of four
children -- sparkling actors -- as their newly single parents fall in love again.
Family Law (CBS, Mondays at 10 p.m.), the least satisfying of the group, is more strongly rooted in one generation
and one place -- the law office. But Kathleen Quinlan has two youngsters and a nanny at home, and her smarmy male
associate shows his sensitive side dealing with a mentally ill brother.
Now and Again (CBS, Fridays at 9 p.m.), the cleverest and most complex, succeeds despite its implausible premise, as
it focuses on the man of the family. From Glenn Gordon Caron (the man responsible for Moonlighting), it puts the
brain of a dead middle-aged man into the bionic body of a young hottie. He handles the bad guys with ease, but
falters when dealing with his widow and daughter, who can never know his more than six-million-dollar secret.
Other new family dramas that focus on the youngsters are staggering. Fox's smug Get Real weighs in at 95th among 129
Nielsen-rated series compiled through Nov. 7. NBC's delightful Freaks and Geeks is only two notches better.
Such numbers may reflect that TV has been wrong in ignoring the over-40 baby boomers, who still fit nicely into the
18-to-49 demographic that advertisers seek. "For several seasons," said CBS president Leslie Moonves,
"there's been a glut of teenage angst-driven shows, all targeting the same audience, when in fact the real
audience is the baby boomers."
The success of the new family dramas actually poses a problem.
"You never go into a season and expect all your new dramas to be around for a full 22-episode order and looking
like they will go beyond that," Moonves said. "I've got two great midseason shows, and nowhere to put
them."
Falcone, the TV adaptation of the feature film Donnie Brasco, and the Steven Bochco hospital drama City of Angels
might need an earthquake to shake them off the shelf.
There's a problem for viewers, too. Like the last fad, teen shows, adult dramas that spend time on ordinary doings
should soon cover the TV-scape.
Could Underwriting Peter be waiting, just over the 2000 horizon? The first spinoff of Judging Amy, it might focus on
the fascinating doings in the life of her older brother -- the insurance salesman.
Copyright © 1999 Ottawa Citizen. All rights reserved.
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